Set in Baden-Baden, Smoke is Ivan Turgenev's most cosmopolitan novels. It is an exquisite study of politics and society and an enduringly poignant love story. Smoke, with its European setting, barbed wit, and visionary call for Russia to look west, became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky. On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fianc�e ...
Read More
Set in Baden-Baden, Smoke is Ivan Turgenev's most cosmopolitan novels. It is an exquisite study of politics and society and an enduringly poignant love story. Smoke, with its European setting, barbed wit, and visionary call for Russia to look west, became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky. On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fianc�e Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his old flame, the manipulative Irina-now married to a general and a prominent figure in aristocratic expatriate circles-unearths feelings buried deep inside the young man's heart, derailing his plans for the future and throwing his life into turmoil. Around this love story Turgenev constructs a sharply satirical expos� of his countrymen, which famously embroiled its author in a heated quarrel with Dostoevsky. A melancholy evocation of impossible romance, Smoke represents the apogee of Turgenev's later fiction.
Read Less
Add this copy of Smoke to cart. $32.34, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Independently published.
If you want to know what it was like to be in a Rhine gambling resort in the mid 19th century read Smoke.
The mix of people could no doubt be seen in modern Las Vegas but without Russian aristocrats, Lenin saw to that!
Turgenev is a master writer, this is I think not his best work, I like "Sportsmans Sketches" this is a personal thing, but this is like saying the modern Rolls Royce is not as good as the old ones, they are all brilliant.
Turgenev, a most human man, put Russian writers on the word map, they never left it since.
